5 ms·

Does this assume that developers should wash the dishes? If so, why is that a good idea? I would assume that developer time is too expensive for that...

• Jach 14y ago
  For those who haven't heard, hammock-driven development is great: http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586 http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586 (The short infographic version: http://incanter.org/images/misc/hammock-driven-dev.png http://incanter.org/images/misc/hammock-driven-dev.png ) The mindless job of dishwashing is just another way to think about a problem away from a computer, plus it's useful.
  • mkopinsky 14y ago
    The mindless job of dishwashing is just another way to think about a problem away from a computer, plus it's useful. This works if your coworkers are happy to leave you alone to think. I often pace the halls at work while I think, but the moment I step into the breakroom I get greeted with "Hi Michael how are you so nice to see you how was your weekend" which makes the exercise kind of pointless. Not that I have anything necessarily against small talk, but the time spent in the breakroom is unproductive time.
    • malnourish 14y ago
      And there's nothing wrong with breakroom time being for, well, breaks.
• brown9-2 14y ago
  In your opinion, which types of employees are not too important to watch the dishes which they dirty?
  • jodrellblank 14y ago
    Where did you get "important" from? He said 'time too valuable'. This is a practical salary versus return on work done calculation, not a human worth judgement.
    • wpietri 14y ago
      The two aren't totally separable. Status calculations are a fundamental human behavior, and social systems tend to move in directions of class and hierarchy. (For more on this, the books Chimpanzee Politics by DeWaal and Impro by Johnstone are readable and very compelling. Consider also that absolute salary differences matter less for happiness than relative salary differences, which is economically insane but very human.) I strongly believe that a lot of corporate idiocy is driven by hidden status games. E.g., the way that managers often have status in proportion to the size of budget or staff, which gives an incentive away from maximum efficiency. Unconventional approaches to management push against this. E.g., the notion of servant leadership, or Toyota's explicit focus on management's responsibility to support the people doing the real work. Valve presumably has something similar.
    • brown9-2 14y ago
      "Time too valuable" and "too important" seem like synonyms to me. Both are ways of arguing that you should be exempt from certain tasks that the rest of society / your group is not.
• philwelch 14y ago
  Not that I have the most experience here, but I've never felt my time was too expensive to wash dishes. Your ego may vary. Maybe there's some marginal value in saving highly paid employees from doing menial work, but there's also a cost in terms of culture when you treat people like they're better than anyone else.
• wpietri 14y ago
  Well if developer time is that valuable, I think Mel Brooks has an innovation for your office that you should look into: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGfXiIXTpE0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGfXiIXTpE0 More seriously, I think that allegedly financial calculation often ends up covering up for laziness, arrogance, and hierarchies of social class. Make sure the code works? That's QA's job. Make sure it runs well? Oh, that's ops; file a ticket. Wash my own dishes? Hey, office manager, get on that. Oh, and and honey, make me some coffee while you're at it. I know some companies work that way, but I'd never want to work at one.
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  • jrockway 14y ago
    If you have a unique skill, it makes sense to pay you to mostly utilize that skill. If you're great at programming and terrible at system administration, why should you have to administer your servers, especially when there are people that are great at it? Testing is a little different: most professional software engineers consider testing an intrinsic part of software engineering, and so would never say, "that's QA's job". (But even then, there are some especially hairy testing problems that would benefit from a specialist's touch.) Anyway, I think you're conflating dysfunctional organizations with specialization. In your example, developers say "that's operations' job" because they are lazy and don't care about maintaining a sane production environment. In a functional organization, they'll say the same thing, but they'll mean, "that's operations' job because they will do a better job than me". It sounds the same, but it means something entirely different. (The same goes for washing dishes. I could wash my own dishes, but I would use a lot of water. If we batch up all the dishes in a 3000-person company each day and wash them in an industrial dishwasher, it will take less aggregate time and use much less water and energy. So while washing your own dishes may be symbolic of teamwork, it's actually a dumb thing to do.)
    • erikpukinskis 14y ago
      I would love to see some evidence that complete and total specialization is the maximum possible way to achieve business goals. I know in my work, I've found that doing a variety of things, including "grunt work" leads many times to great works of creativity and discoveries of new ways to be more efficient. If you have a Ph.D. sweeping floors, you can bet they're going to take a stab at making the entire "floor sweeping" problem disappear. Not so much for a professional janitor. Putting your head down and focusing is great when you have a mountain of obvious work to do. But that's not always what the business needs.
• neilk 14y ago
  Please shoot me if I ever start thinking my brain is too valuable to waste on basic hygiene. There is a dishwasher. It's five seconds to rinse your dish and put it away. At the WMF, there is someone whose job it is to make sure the kitchens are clean and the dishwasher gets run, but that's only effective because most people exercise common sense.
  • loboman 14y ago
    I was genuinely interested in the answers, so thanks for the interesting replies. I don't have a dishwasher so I didn't know it could be so quick. I agree spending 10 or 20 seconds or a minute on something that's useful for everybody is not a bad idea. I'm just not sure how that scales for tasks that require more time. If there is some task that requires 20 minutes, and the company is big enough, do the answers change or do they not? Maybe it is better to hire a dedicated person for the office to do that than to make everyone use 20 minutes of their time every day on such task?
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• lifeformed 14y ago
  Reminds me of living with roommates. It takes literally 10 seconds to wash (not just rinse, but entirely wash) a bowl and a spoon. Nothing has to stay in the sink - just wash things right when you're done using them.
  • jquery 14y ago
    A proper dishwasher spends 20-60 minutes throwing water at dirty dishes. 10 seconds leaves tons of bacteria and dirt still on the dish.
    • erikpukinskis 14y ago
      It's good practice for your immune system, for later in life when the real shit hits the fan.
    • zobzu 14y ago
      A propose dishwasher sends water around, and its not very strong to avoid breaking stuff. Hand washing is a lot more efficient. Anyhow on point, takes 10s (or maybe 30) to wash ur dish and leave it in the sink xD Takes 5-10min if you leave it and wash it the next day.
  • bostonvaulter2 14y ago
    I generally wash my dishes in large batches because it takes the water about 4 minutes to get hot enough to use for real dish washing
• zachrose 14y ago
  Barack Obama on his dog: "Sometimes I have to scoop up his poop, because I don't want to just leave it in the lawn!" http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-501370_162-7160351.html http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-501370_162-7160351.html
• jsprinkles 14y ago
  Is this what brogramming sounds like? Too much Rockstar to rinse off the plate, leave it for somebody else? Are we engineers or high schoolers these days?
  • jquery 14y ago
    Yes, because only male developers might not want to spend their valuable work hours scrubbing dishes because the company is too cheap to have a working dishwasher.
    • wpietri 14y ago
      Who said nobody could have an automatic dishwasher? But even if you have one, at some places dishes pile up in the sink, and at some places they don't.
• jrockway 14y ago
  At Google, you put your dirty dishes in the nearest dish collection area, and the magic dish fairies periodically whisk them away to be cleaned.
• scotty79 14y ago
  Whenever I did anything not programming related at the place where I worked I had a feeling that I'm getting money for free. I was selling work of and inexperienced tea maker or dishwasher or cleaner or delivery man to my employer at hourly rate of a skilled programmer. One of the best deals I've ever done albeit short one.
• cheald 14y ago
  By extension, developer time is too expensive to be wasted on long lunch breaks, socialization with co-workers, or toasting your bagel in the morning rather than eating it untoasted. Basic hygiene/workspace maintenance is everyone's job. There are people who specialize, of course (the cleaning staff; if you have them, developers aren't scrubbing toilets and steam cleaning carpets, of course), but it takes literally 5 seconds to rinse a dish and put it in the dishwasher, the act of which improves the entire workspace and contributes to overall order in the environment. If you don't have a dishwasher, it might take upwards of 30 seconds to wash your plate, dry it, and put it away. Developers are actually in a unique position where they can do their job while doing other things; much of a developer's job involves thinking through problems, and menial physical tasks are actually a pretty great way to get your brain engaged on the problems.
• joezydeco 14y ago
  What if one of your fellow developers is looking for a clean dish and glass and there are none to be had? All he sees is a sink full of dirty shit that nobody has touched. So you may have saved some time dropping your stuff in the sink, but now you have another developer who's spending the identical amount of time cleaning up...but in addition he's pissed off as well. Sounds like a positive outcome to me.